Worthless hack. America's truly a great land. In America you can write (poorly) about potato salad with one hand while typing excuses for torturers with the other--and get paid--while millions of hard working talented people with functioning moral compasses are out of work through no fault of their own.

Keillor's column is an embarrassment to Salon rivaling Glennallen Walken's contrived bullshit and Paglia's schizophrenic screeds about monkeys flying out of celebrity asses (or whatever nonsensical topic she excrutiatingly goes on and on about page after page when she feels obligated to phone some pap in to rationalize her paycheck).

Keillor really should retire to his backwater mansion and spend his days drunk driving his Lamborghini while creepily stalking "coltish" 20 somethings--because he's clearly lost any capacity to discern that his writing sucks wind.

Please please please Joan show the above mentioned hacks the door. Hire some decent writers like Dan Froomkin or Marcy Wheeler, up the premium subscription a tad, and my guess is subscription checks would come rolling in. Those three are single handedly keeping away a lot of potential revenue.

My family is fairly strictly divided over dill pickle vs. sweet pickle in the potato salad. My mother fought for the dill pickle side, as do I. I've never had much use for sweet pickles.

Her trick was to pour a little juice from the pickle jar over the hot potatoes as they were draining in the colander. The potatoes drink it up and become infused with sour pickle-y goodness. Yum.

Thanks for the great tip on pouring pickle juice over the hot potatoes. Can't wait to try it.

I want to see if we can waterboard a troll with potato salad. And let's use extra mustard and pepper.

"Take half an hour away from your Facebook page and do the job right." The smugness of the gratuitous Facebook jibe could possibly be forgiven if the rest of the sentence didn't indicate Keillor hasn't tried this himself. You can't cook potatoes and hard-boiled eggs and cool them to a safe temperature for combining with homemade mayonnaise (even if you can be making that while the potatoes and eggs are cooking) and chop and add all the other ingredients in just half an hour. Just be honest and say "Take an hour or so."

From here on out, assign Garrison to bring the potato salad.

Pesto potato salad: Chop red potatoes into halves or quarters. Sprinkle with Lawry's Garlic Salt and steam (skins on) till just soft enough to eat as-is (fork tender). While the potatoes are steaming thin-slice red onion, and combine equal parts pesto + mayonnaise. Once the potatoes have cooled combine with the red onions and then dress with the pesto/mayo. Voila~

Picnic potato salad: Boil regular brown potatoes (skins on) till fork tender. Drain and allow to cool. They may fall apart, that's fine. Boil eggs. While eggs and potatoes cool (then chop) chop black olives, sweet pickles, dill pickles and green onion. Combine 2 parts mayo + 1 part yellow mustard + a little sweet pickle juice (to taste). Combine all the chopped stuff. Dress with the dressing. Season w/ salt, pepper and paprika. YUM!

And along with the crispy potato salad and the crunchy fried chicken--yes, skin on--serve homemade cucumber salad. Slice the cukes the day before, salt them and put them in the fridge on paper towels with a weight on top and a bowl underneath. They are, after all, about 90% water. After they're sweated, stir in equal amounts of sour cream and mayo. Dill also goes well in cucumber salad.

Garrison,

Loved your article on potato salad. I have to admit, we've gone the easy route and grabbed the plastic bucket at Costco far too often. But not everybody has a flair for cooking, so for example, living here in California and longing for a good Upper Peninsula pasty, I wait until winter and then order some pasties online (pasty.com - they don't ship in summer because they pack them in dry ice and use ground shipping). But they're hand crafted by the old-timers in Calumet, MI, the old fashioned way. Takes me back.

I learned how to make tater salad when I was a college student working in a prep kitchen. Our salad went to a fancy restaurant that liked to serve the humble dish now and then for some reason. Anyway we always added some black walmuts at the very end, and mixed them in well. We also used white pepper, which has a slightly more punchy zing than black pepper.

Absolutely awesome.

And yeah, the torture issue... but you7 can't change the world every day, just give yourself a break now and then for cryin out loud.

Orchids

Most of the Keillor critics miss the point of his homespun language. Its that Americans are becoming more and more disconnected from the world around them.

Think of any culture -- French, Mexican, Italian, Cajun, Chinese, Indian -- and doubtless the first thing that comes to mind is the food. Food is the linchpin of every culture. A culture that has no cuisine is in the process of going out of existence.

People don't cook anymore, and this is a serious problem. We don't know what goes into our mouths, so how can we relate to our environment, which needs us more than ever?

Go back and look at the Salon page. The lead story is about overfishing. Overfishing occurs because food processing is an industry, instead of an event in the home.

Did it bother me when Keillor talked about letting the torturers off? Sure it did. But give me choice between sending Bush to jail and teaching every American to make a mean potato salad and I will choose the latter. We can't protect our world if citizens are so insulated from it that they have never seen a fish with the head and scales on.

Good cooking makes a home. You can't build community and family in a restaurant. So stop carping about Bush and go home and cook for your family like caring Americans do.